Investigating culture-related aspects of behavior for virtual characters

Abstract

In this paper, culture-related behaviors are investigated on several channels of communication for virtual characters. Prototypical behaviors were formalized in computational models based on a literature review as well as a corpus analysis, exemplifying the German and Japanese cultures. Therefore, aspects of verbal behavior, communication management and nonverbal behavior were taken into account. In evaluation studies conducted in the targeted cultures, each aspect’s impact on human observers was tested. With it, we investigated for which of the aspects, observers prefer agent behavior that was designed to resemble their own cultural background.